The app discovery service Chomp does no longer offer support for Android apps. Its support for the iPhone and iPad remains unchanged. The startup has been acquired by Apple in February to improve app discoverability in its app stores for iPhone and iPad.

Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference takes place June 11 to 15 in San Francisco, CA. Don't start packing your bags yet, the event sold out within 2 hours. The lucky attendees will enjoy over 100 sessions and find over 1000 Apple engineers to chatter about iOS development. But do not despair, the session videos will be available online for registered Apple developers. Despite the price of $1600 per ticket, the conference sold out lightning fast. However, those bucks are just a drop in the ocean of Apple's $39.2 billion revenue in the last quarter.

The third developer preview of Mac OS X Mountain Lion has Xcode 4.4 in the trunk. The current version is available to developers signed up for the Apple developer program. The iOS app development suite packs a few new features like an updated LLVM Compiler, improved support for the 2011 C++ standard, among others. It can be downloaded over the Mac Dev Center.

A few days ago, reports appeared that Apple has started rejecting iOS apps accessing UDIDs for tracking users. These reports are "completely fabricated", says app promotion company Chartboost after being in direct contact with Apple. However, this will not change the overall decision to give up the use of UDIDs.

The voice command feature unique to the iPhone 4S is widely used. This is confirmed by a recent study of the consulting group Parks Associates – 87 percent of iPhone 4S owners use Siri at least once a month. Even though it is used by many, the range of tasks is not exhausted to its full extent. Siri is mostly used for making phone calls and sending text messages while playing music and scheduling meetings is not as common.

Apple has started rejecting apps that access Unique Device IDs (UDIDs). The general decision to deprecate UDIDs has been announced half a year ago, but apparently the process has been speeded up after recent privacy concerns. Developers are looking for alternatives.

Much like there has been no iPhone5, there is no iPad3. But, behold, there is "the new iPad". It is a tiny bit thicker and heavier than the iPad2, has a chip with quad-core graphics, a better camera and most notably a better display.

Apple does not publish official platform distribution numbers. However, there is some data out there, indicating that iOS5 runs on about 75% of all iOS devices. With that in mind, iOS developers have an advantage over other operating systems: they hardly have to consider backward compatibility.

7 March will most likely be the date when a new Apple iPad will be presented to the public. So, one week to go you can spend speculating - if you feel like.

The Path-situation was the spark that set the whole iPhone address book access discussion on fire. After a developer discovered that the Path app would upload the entire address book to Path servers in an unencrypted form, much criticism followed directed towards a lot of other apps doing the same. Meanwhile, some have changed their policies and added permission requests about address book access. With questions arising about why Apple did not include better protection in their iOS, the Cupertino-ers now responded saying they will implement better protection procedures in future releases and apps that don't ask are in violation of Apple's rules.

19 % of all iOS downloads were iPad apps - on average since the launch of the iPad in 2010. In total, that is 3 billion downloads. Android cannot yet compete with these impressive numbers, having only around 440 million downloads so far, but is expected to catch up.

We already know that Siri, the voice command for the iPhone 4S, can take on a lot of tasks for us. Among a lot of other things, the "Virtual Assistant" helps us to make appointments, send messages, add reminders or control the phone's music player. Some already tried to find out how Siri's performance can be extended. Now, with Siri's protocol dissected, hackers look for possibilities to use the voice command over its initial functionality.

The local church of Saalfelden, Austria, is one of the first offering their religious citizens contact to the parish through an active web community. Their approach to communicate online with the municipality has been put into practice through a new website, appearance on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and even an own iPhone App, which is unique in Austria.

Apps can be fun. Apps can be useful. But apps can also be incredibly important and irreplaceable in people's lifes. This is a short story of how an iPhone and a young iOS developer completely changed the life of Lisa and her autistic daughter Grace.

The music streaming service iTunes Match has been rolled out to countries outside the US. At a yearly subscription fee of 25 Euro, users can upload their music library to the cloud and access it from other devices. iTunes Match has been launched in the US back in November.